Memorandum 170
Submission from Professor David Fisk,
Imperial College London
SUMMARY
- Central Government has seen a very large
transfer of engineering knowledge and skills to Agencies and more
latterly the private sector.
- The engineering skills that remain in Government
are an ad hoc legacy, rather than the consequence of a formal
downsizing plan.
- If Governments wish to have policies and
public procurement marked out for innovation rather than costly
novelty it seems likely that the transfer has gone too far.
- The most effective redress would be a much
tougher external scrutiny of the engineering judgements that underlie
Government action.
INTRODUCTION
1. I was Chief Scientist in DOE and then
subsequently DETR, DTLR, ODPM and DCLG from 1988 to 2005. My submission
offers some reflections as Head of Profession over that period.
I was previously Head of the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering
Division at the Building Research Establishment. I am a member
of the Research Assessment Exercise General Engineering Sub Panel
and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. For the purposes
of this evidence I am taking "engineering" to be the
art of devising something that one group of people will want to
make and another group of people will want to use. This contrasts
with "science and technology" which I take to be knowledge
just about "things". The main consequence of this distinction
is that "engineering advice" will almost always contain
an element of risk and professional judgement.
3. This evidence focuses on engineering
skills in Government which I choose to measure by "Chartered
Engineer" status. While this is not ideal it covers some
50 accreditation bodies and ensures some formal process to keep
engineering skills and knowledge up to date. There is a wider
informal sphere of engineering knowledge in Government but my
working "professional" definition is no more than would
be taken for granted in an inquiry into, say, the Government legal
service. I have no direct experience of MoD and have therefore
not included its important engineering role in this evidence.
HOW MANY
ENGINEERS ARE
THERE IN
GOVERNMENT?
4. Unlike the economist and statisticians
classes, Government has kept no central record of engineers in
Government since the mid-1980s. My evidence has had to rely on
FOI inquiries at Departmental and Agency level. Some organisations
are in the process of building their databases (as in the CAA),
but in other cases (eg Scottish Executive) personal data on professional
competences are not held at all. In central government the numbers
of professionally qualified engineers are to say the least modest.
DTI in its last year did not know the precise number of Chartered
Engineers though it "could recall 10". If this is really
true it is a smaller number than the number of members of the
Chinese Politburo with engineering qualifications! DfT's Rail
Group which undertakes much of the role of the old Strategic Rail
Authority has just twelve chartered engineers in a staff of almost
300.
5. These figures are in stark contrast to
those of the 1960s when a great deal of engineering was undertaken
in, or close to, Central Government. Bodies like the Property
Services Agency or the Central Electricity Generating Board were
headed by formidable individuals with extraordinary grasp of their
engineering. At this time the Civil Service had a well defined
class called "Professional and Technical Officer" that
paralleled "Scientific Officer" class. Between 1939
and 1959 the numbers in both classes rose from 11,000 to 70,000.
The dramatic reduction since then reflects a change in Government
structure rather than the amount of engineering undertaken in
the name of the public sector. If anything, engineering issues
have increased both in scale and complexity. When Executive Agencies
and Regulators were formed they took from the home Department
most of the engineers with the relevant experience. Some bodies
like the Research Establishments were subsequently privatised.
Pressure on civil service headcounts encouraged both Central Government
and Agencies to "buy in" engineering expertise. It should
be borne in mind that the small numbers quoted in this evidence
for the headcount of engineers in Departments refers to individuals
who were in post in the late-1980's-early-1990's. This cohort
represents a vast field of personal experience. The issue of public
interest is then not the small number currently in post but that
coherent plans for the recruitment of their successors are hard
to find.
6. Indeed the whole transformation of Departmental
engineering skills took place ad hoc. While there may be no magic
number for engineers in Government I can advance circumstantial
evidence suggesting that the UK has undershot. The transformation
did not begin from a comfortable beginning. Despite the impressive
number of engineers in Government the 1960's was not a Golden
Era. Sampson's 1965 Anatomy of Britain devotes a whole section
to the "problems of the scientific and technical" specialists
in the Civil Service and the tension with "generalists".
This tension eventually led to the Holdgate Report in 1980. Even
this report limited itself to just the "science class".
It was to be the last time that the Cabinet Office reflected publicly
on using technical specialist advice for 20 years. Few of Holdgate's
recommendations were implemented given the changes that were starting
to happen in parallel.
7. Moving engineering competence out of
Departments to Next Step Agencies was consistent with giving the
latter more freedoms. But it is hard not to suspect that the more
specialists that could be shifted the more the old tiresome tensions
could be relieved. The number of engineering specialists in the
Centre was further shaved by the collateral damage of other well-intentioned
reforms. The Fulton Report had already removed the broad career
flexibility of the "un-established" civil servant. In
the 1980's wider reforms absorbed technical generalists into the
main generalist policy adviser stream of the Civil Service, while
retaining Economists and Statisticians as identified classes.
This was also the time when MoD chose to distance itself from
civil departments. The consequence was that there was no common
career pool and the few engineers remaining in Departments were
effectively in specialist ghettos. External pressure on staff
head count encouraged both the central Departments and Agencies
to outsource engineering advice rather than replace retirees.
8. The Modernising Government White
Paper in 1999 addressed the revolution demanded by the new Administration.
But it makes no reference to specialists. Its reforms included
the extension of the Senior Civil Service to "Divisional
Manager" level. But this meant the imposition on the natural
career grade for senior specialist advisers of formal competency
requirements appropriate to managers of administrative Divisions.
The Senior Civil Service is no country for young expert engineers!
More recently the Mottram report (Professional Skills-Death
of the Generalist) identified three kinds of civil service
function but it is hard to see where engineering experience outside
of IT was supposed to fit in. The career problems of specialists
are recognised in the Professional Skills for Government agenda,
but this area has been left to Departments and as far as can be
judged nothing has been done. Somewhat surprisingly, given these
reforms, the Capability Reviews give rather little weighting to
a Department actually mastering the substance underlying its patch
To date the Science Reviews have not probed engineering competence
at all. It became clear from my inquiries that human resources
divisions have something of a general blind spot on professionalism.
While seeking some kind of calibration I was told that the Finance
Services Authority knows it has 2,670 employees but does not know
how many have Chartered Accountant status.
9. It is too easy to focus on Central Departments
and forget that most engineering decisions affecting citizens'
daily lives take place in statutory agencies. Amongst enforcement
agencies, HSE seemedd well informed on its expertise. Of its 4,000
staff, 252 are Chartered Engineers. The Environment Agency which
has to make significant engineering judgements has 12,000 staff,
200 of which are in "engineering roles", and of those
23 are classed MEICA (mechanical, electrical, information, control
and automation) engineers. It does not know if they hold Chartered
Engineer status.
10. "Economic" regulators spend
a great deal of time probing capital expenditure plans proposed
by industry that require substantial engineering judgements. For
example Ofwat has six chartered engineers in a staff of 200. Ofcom
a little surprisingly given the technical complexity of its tasks
in a world of information technology is not sure how many of its
800 staff are chartered engineers, but does know it pays CEng
fees for six. The Civil Aviation Authority is still assembling
its database.
11. Thus the numbers of engineers in agencies
and regulators is higher as is to be expected but not dramatically
so. Incident investigation units were the honourable exception
to these modest percentages. My broad conclusion is that the strength
of engineering knowledge in government is largely the result of
accident; that, despite the Professional Skills Agenda, there
is not much evidence of nurturing professional skills; that neither
sponsor departments nor supervisory boards seem to take much interest
in human capital in engineering as part of a statutory function's
"balanced scorecard"; that, while there may be no magic
percentage of engineers in public service, other pressures mean
the UK is likely to have ended up with too few not too many.
BUYING IN
ENGINEERING ADVICE
12. Whether any organisation actually needs
in-house engineering skills depends on what it wants to do. You
don't need to know how to build a bus to buy a bus ticket. When
the organisation intends to do something that has never been done
before it needs to be equipped to make judgements.
13. The least contentious case is when in-house
staff outsources engineering analysis that they could have completed
themselves so that they have more time to focus on the most difficult
issues. The organisation is then always able to appraise the advice
it receives. The case where the organisation is able to formulate
the problem but is not able to devise any solution itself is more
problematic. Who bears the risk if the ill-equipped organisation
takes the advice offered? Again if the issue is simple there is
no issue. But if the organisation's intention is to be "innovative"
without it acquiring the capacity to assess risks, the picture
changes. In particular the consultant in formulating advice needs
to be more diffident bearing in mind the need for due diligence.
This is especially true if public discourse is content to allow
a failure to be blamed on the contractor not the contract! The
weaker the in-house expertise the less likely the organisation
itself realises the change in the style of advice provoked by
contractor risk management. Governments of course are faced with
a barrage of counter proposals by lobbyists whenever they propose
to act. The less able they are to evaluate these the more likely
they are to end up prevaricating. The worse case of all is when
the organisation is capable of only a poor formulation of the
problem let alone any assessment of conflicting "answers".
14. In my experience contractors would much
prefer to work with the first case's "intelligent customers".
The need for these beings has been posited since the days of the
Rothschild "Customer-Contractor" model of research procurement,
periodically repeated in reviews, but seldom realised. While the
first case is presumably the ideal, the immediate public interest
priority is to avoid the UK public sector slipping into the third
case of bemused organisational ignorance.
15. As a recent example of the issues, Government
accepted the recommendation of the Commission on Environmental
Markets and Economic Performance on which I served to have a more
technically proactive procurement policy. Innovation Nation rightly
proposes obtaining private sector advice in formulating tenders
to provoke more innovative proposals but it is silent as to how
in the proposals received the innovative are to be distinguished
from the disasters. In contrast Transport for London staffed itself
not only to procure but also to assess innovative proposals. The
DCLG call for "Eco-town" made much of proposals needing
to showcase innovative technology, but as the Royal Academy of
Engineering noted in its response it did not actually include
any engineers on the proposal review panel. This is despite engineering
failures of untested technologies playing an important role in
the difficulties of many "third wave" New Towns in the
1970s.
16. There is a particular problem in the
UK because Treasury often has a formative part in shaping as well
as funding initiatives. While acknowledging the undoubted skill
set of public sector economists, there is no reason to expect
that they have much experience in either the risk management issues
or the modality of operation of real world engineering enterprises.
The Treasury Green Book used as the basis for policy appraisal
does not distinguish engineering innovation issues at all. Treasury
of course does not have a Chief Scientist.
IS IT
DIFFERENT ABROAD?
17. I have given advice on using scientific
advice to policy making to Commonwealth Governments and the European
Commission. It would seem that the tension between political and
specialist advice is here to stay. Outsourcing of engineering
advice is widespread. The European Commission retained a single
consultant to inform its antitrust action against the might of
Microsoft. But none, including the US, seem to have gone as far
as the UK in the degree to which they have distanced engineering
knowledge from the Centre. Almost all countries, including the
European Commission, have at least retained some engineering research
capability that can serve as a resource for staffing headquarters
functions. The US has a much more flexible career relationship
between private and public sectors at Federal and State level.
The US National Academy of Engineering records 7% of its members
as in the "government and not-for-profit" sector, in
contrast to around 3% (my estimate of the NAE equivalent) in the
Royal Academy of Engineering. In stark contrast the "Asian
Tiger" Model has been to throw the throttle full on in the
other direction with very strong technocratic administrations.
TRAINING AND
SKILLS
18. If the public sector has forgotten about
engineering, engineering education seems to have forgotten about
work in the public sector. The much applauded Royal Academy of
Engineering report on engineering education (Educating Engineers
for the 21st Century 2007) makes no mention of training to acquire
skills to work within Government and Agencies. Imperial and Cambridge,
amongst the top five European engineering schools record less
than 2% of their UK resident engineering graduates entering the
whole public sector. I have not myself ever given much credibility
to Civil Service "science and technology fast stream"
entry. Its current undemanding first degree requirements underlie
the point. In any case it is far more important to understand
how engineers with real world experience are brought into the
public sector, and how they are trained to work within public
policy. Of the 16 specialist programmes at the National School
of Government (NSG), none are designed for mature entry engineering
specialists. The only NSG induction programme I have found was
for economists. Indeed none of the six qualities highlighted by
the Civil Service Commission Recruitment Gateway for "experienced
professionals" entry seems to require actually knowing anything
in any detail. There are more demanding entry requirements for
"professionals" but none of these classes cover engineering
or science in civil departments.
19. There well may be some "executive"
induction training for new Chief Scientists. But I doubt the problem
is at this high level. After all if Ministers were uncertain about
a submission, the Private Office could always invite the President
of the relevant engineering institution in for a chat! The difficulty
is in the many more low profile decisions taking place across
the whole civil side of the public sector.
RECOMMENDATIONS[18]
20. Based on past experience I doubt that
procedural recommendations will have much real traction. The deployment
of specialist resources within the Government on say legal services,
or the economics service or press offices is not capricious. Departments
have to combat citizens in the Courts, Treasury in the reviews
of spending and rebut the Press on a daily basis. I believe it
is no accident that the one area that has been robust to my own
inquiries is the high profile area of incident investigation.
From outside MoD appears to take more interest in its engineering,
but then its decisions are tested on the modern battlefield. If
Departments were to be held more effectively accountable for "winging
it" on engineering, I am confident that resources would redeploy
with great ingenuity and rapidity.
21. Unfortunately those able to spot the
engineering errors can be represented in uninformed public debate
as interested parties, or they have little incentive to correct
reasoning because they are in a good position to be paid later
for putting errors right. While our journalists are required to
meet standards of professionalism and in the BBC's case, impartiality,
this does not include, with some outstanding exceptions, actually
understanding the substance on which they are reporting. A good
technical press operates in a cognoscente's world of its own.
All this is of course is the public interest rationale for Departments
and Agencies having some internal mastery of what they are doing.
For some reason blaming the contractor not the contract has become
an accepted explanation for failure in delivery. Caveat emptor
no longer applies. That itself brings new dubious rewards
for the Executive to contract out what it does not understand.
22. If the Executive was minded to be more
self-reflective on its engineering capabilities my guess is that
it would rapidly devise a flexible employment contract suitable
for employing engineering expertise that was not a life sentence.
It would correctly address the induction needed to bring in experienced
engineers to work in the public sector and identify appropriate
competencies at career grade. It would create a proper service-wide
career pool and a proper professional development programme appropriate
to public service.
September 2008
18 In obtaining information through FOI requests I
have been at pains not to burden Departments and Agencies. No
doubt in preparing their own evidence they would devote more time
to precision, and if there are any discrepancies I bow to their
figures. In most cases the numbers are so bald that I cannot believe
the differences would be significant to my conclusions. Back
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